Syria may be Obama's real headache

A trifecta of domestic headaches confronts President Obama these days. They’ve shaken his self-confidence, thrown his second-term agenda off track, and given Republicans seemingly endless opportunities to hammer him.

And yet a fourth headache looms not at home; but abroad, a migraine really, potentially more painful than the rest.

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Unlike the IRS, Associated Press, and Benghazi stories, the Syrian crisis will not run out the media cycle; it’s going to continue to hound the president, threatening to draw America in.

And unlike his domestic travails, where the president has some latitude to do damage control, the Syrian civil war offers up no good options.

So far, the president has willfully and wisely tried to avoid militarizing America’s role there. But the course he’s chosen now – trying diplomacy with the Russians — may paradoxically accelerate the very military option he’s trying to avoid.

Traditionally, a second-term president has seen foreign policy as an area of potential opportunity when his domestic agenda gets bogged down by Congress or even scandal. Using Henry Kissinger, President Nixon did remarkable Middle East diplomacy during Watergate.

That’s not likely to be Obama’s story. Abroad, particularly in the Middle East, he confronts nothing but the stuff of root canals. An Arab Spring headed south; an Iran in search of a nuclear weapons capacity, and an Israeli-Palestinian conflict now at an impasse.

Right now Syria is the most kinetic and dangerous of them all. With 80,000 dead, several million refugees, Israeli-Syrian confrontation looming, chemical weapons already deployed, Syria’s civil war shows only signs of getting worse. The Assad regime, buffered by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, continues to hang on; and the rebels – however inchoate and unorganized - won’t give in either.

America’s options are terrible: doing nothing is unacceptable and the limited steps the administration has taken, including non-lethal assistance and intelligence sharing to support the rebels, have proven ineffective. The president has shied away from providing weapons or creating a no-fly zone, let alone directly intervening with missile strikes because he rightly wonders what the end game will be. Indeed, in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama knows that getting into these kind of conflicts is easier than getting out. And he doesn’t want to America stuck with the check.

The president’s domestic travails are worrisome. But at least he can act: firing the head of the IRS; releasing emails related to Benghazi; moving to create a national shield law to protect the press. If the IRS story doesn’t get worse, the scandals will burn themselves out, though together they raise competency issues and give the Republicans and the tea party in particular a second wind.